Hi, lovelies! Welcome back! In today’s post, we’ll be talking about saving money in the new year! This is a great topic and a favourite of mine because, to be honest, I need to follow a few of these myself! So to try and show you a few cool ideas, I’m also forcing myself to adopt at least one of these! Fingers crossed it sticks the whole year…

First things first, you need to be very realistic and aware of how you spend your money. A good way to keep track of this is to keep receipts. Simple as that. Just save every single one of them and in the end of January, list them into different categories so you clearly see where your money is going.

A great tip I found is to keep short-term savings goals! If you aim to save 20,000€ or 1000€ even, it will seem impossible and you’ll get bored fast and end up using all that money you had started putting aside. My advice is short-term goals. (Take this in anything in life really) Maybe start with 10€ a week. 1€ a week. Whatever works for you! Again, be realistic! If you know what your budget is, you’ll be more realistic and not try to aim for a ridiculous amount of money that you’d never have left at the end of the month.

Another idea that we’ve been doing in our house for a long time is save your loose change. Yep! It’s loose change and it won’t be much, not even after a year, but it is something and it will always be there! Also, it’s a whole less tempting to “steal” a 5 cents coin than 1€. It works for me and that’s pretty incredible considering I’m honestly the worst at saving.

Ok, now I have one tip that is kind of 2 but works in the same way! Wait 24 hours to decide if you truly need/want to buy something! Some go deeper and say you should wait 30 days, but in my opinion, if you really can wait 30 days, you don’t need it. I’d say the perfect balance is at 1 week. Wait for a week and see if you really want that jacket or that video game. I’ve done this many times and it has always worked! Most of the time, I don’t even remember what I wanted to buy and just move on with life (and money in my wallet!) The next thing that is related with this is calculate purchases by hours worked instead of cost. Let’s say you make 10€ an hour and you reeeeeally want to buy a new pair of trainers. They cost 90€. Now think, are the trainers really worth 9 hours of your work? This is another one that has truly helped me in the past. Combined, these two work wonders! You should give them a try!

The next is a 52 week money challenge (from southerncalisaver.com) and I chose this one opposed to many other 52 week challenge because I think this one is actually doable. You end up with 1318€/$ at the end of the year and some might say that’s not much, but hey, it’s 1318€ that you wouldn’t have saved otherwise and now you have them. There are more difficult challenges as I mentioned before but it’s really up to you and your income and budget to see what works for you and your family!

The next one I want to talk about is the little jars in the picture at the beginning of the post! I think this is such a clever idea! Again, you can use your loose change or a bigger amount of money but at least you have it divided into what you can spend for what. Obviously I find it cool to start saving for a house or future kids but you can also do it for something you want happening sooner. Like we have a trip to Poland in May, so I’ll designate a jar to our trip and this way we can save whatever money just for Poland. And so on…

What do you think about these ideas? Do you like them and do you think they’re doable? I actually think a few of these would really work for me and in my life. Let me know your opinion and other ideas in the comments below!